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188 Profiles of Anabaptist Women was required to retract her faith publicly on three consecutive Sundays during mass and to perform whatever penance the local priest required of her. Third, she had to sign an affidavit [Urfehde] and confirm it with an oath, agreeing to relinquish her membership in the Anabaptist sect and to remain in the city of Hall. The affidavit also was a guarantee for the government that she would not take further action against the government for their treatment of her.3 Not until August of the same year was Cristina Egger mentioned again in the court records, and then only briefly in relation to her husband. After the arrests of August 1529 at a secret meeting of Anabaptists in the forests near Mils, where Peter Egger was hiding out, the local authorities were told to guard the Egger house carefully, suspecting that Peter would come to see his wife some night under cover of darkness.4 Cristina Egger chose to remain in Hall and care for their children. But other members of the family did not hold to these restrictions. There is mention of both a son and a daughter fleeing with their father.5 Peter's sister Anna, being single, was able to accompany her brother on his preaching tours. It is possible that Anna Egger's participation in teaching and proselytizing influenced women like Dorothea Maler, another Anabaptist woman from the city of Hall, tojoin the movement. Dorothea Maler was part of the group of twenty Anabaptists arrested on August 15, 1529, the day in the church calendar when the assumption of the Virgin Mary [Frauentag] was celebrated. Peter Egger, the leader through whom Dorothea had joined Anabaptism, was one of the suspects related to this group, but he managed to avoid arrest. The majority of the prisoners chose to recant, but Dorothea Maler and Anna Ochsentreiber, whom Dorothea had brought into the movement, remained steadfast and later paid for their faithfulness with their lives.6 The execution of two women from the group arrested on August 15 was commemorated in a Hutterite hymn entitled: "A Song about (or by) Anna Malerin and Ursula Ochsentreiberin, Who Were Drowned at Hall in the Inn Valley."7 A translation of this hymn follows. However, in comparing the Anabaptist court records for Tirol and the narration of these events in the Hutterian chronicle and the martyrology, there was an evident mix­up of their names.8 The family name Ochsentreiber in all likelihood referred to Anna's husband's occupation as herder of the village cattle. Among the 268 women named in the court records of Tirol between 1527 and 1529, this is the only occurrence of the name.9 The uniqueness of this name, its juxtaposition with the family name of Maler in both the Chronicle of the Hutterian Brethren and the Martyrs' Mirror, the fact that a hymn was written to commemorate the death of the two women, and the close similarity between the events recorded in Anabaptist sources and the court records lead to the conclusion that Anna Maler and Ursula Ochsentreiber, Wives, Female Leaders and Two Female Martyrs from Hall 189 and Dorothea Maler and Anna Ochsentreiber refer to the same women. Their Christian names were incorrectly recorded in one or the other of our sources. It could be that the Anabaptists from Hall had purposely chosen to meet on the festival day of August 15, when many people would be engaged in religious activities and less attention would be paid to them. In any case, court officials set about trying to get as much information as possible from the twenty or more prisoners they had managed to arrest in the forests of Mils. In the reports of the first interrogation, only the names of the male leaders, Peter Egger and Hans Amon, were mentioned. It was known that Peter Egger had associated with Hans Amon, the cloth weaver [Tuchscherer] who also was active around Hall at this time.10 Amon later would take over the leadership of Jacob Hutter's followers who practised communal living in the more tolerant atmosphere of Moravia. By the end of August, the authorities had interrogated two unnamed women about the meeting that had taken place in the forests of Mils near Hall. In their first testimony the women had tried to play down the significance of the gathering, a fact the authorities found hard to believe, since it had taken place in such a "suspicious and...

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